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I was thinking I could keep a running update on my bison prep, discoveries in learning, general happenings. . . Maybe a bit like Ralph’s aka Nimravis’ “Sometimes You Have to Whack It”, only my bison prep style if it isn’t too dull and boring.
A recap. I found an almost complete, articulated bison with the skull in January 2019.
I have collected the majority of it. I’m working on processing stuff still and prepping it.
I’m totally new to vertebrate paleontology type stuff. So there is a big learning curve.
I still have bits sitting in bags or small plastic boxes that I haven’t processed and removed the dirt from. That stuff is still moist for the most part.
This post will be embarrassingly honest at times about how I messed up something out of sheer ignorance or how something didn’t work as planned. I’m not beating myself up over anything. Lesson learned and I move on all the wiser.
I’ll be sharing my trials and errors for 2 or 3 reasons.
1. So someone else will know what worked or didn’t.
2. Hopefully give others the courage or motivation to just try and not be afraid to make mistakes.
3. Show how blond I really am. Noooo! Not
really.
4. So others with more experience can chip in and give me guidance and insight.
One thing I found out the wrong way is when you rinse the bones off with water and then let them dry, you’re not supposed to get them wet with water again. Never ever. I had no clue, but it makes sense.
These specific type of bones are still like very old bone with little to no mineralization. So they’re fragile.
When I rinsed the dirt and mud off I did a general, not a thorough cleaning where I got all the dirt out of the nooks and crannies. So I took one of the femurs that had thoroughly dried and went to rinse it again and clean the nitty gritty parts. After I was done I had it sitting next to me on the couch when I heard a very loud crack noise come from the bone!
That was not good! I couldn’t find a crack, but clearly somewhere inside a crack had occurred. It was because the bone was dry. When wet it adsorbed the water, swelled and cracked. So no water. If I had known that I would have been more thorough on the initial cleaning.

Ok as if the clam wasn’t enough excitement for the day, not that this is exciting I also found what I believe is a very old, but modern cow skeleton, which I believe is most likely fully articulated. I just want to confirm it is cow.
I went fossil hunting yesterday, which was almost a complete and total bust for me. Rarely happens, but that was the case fossil wise.
However that does not mean I didn’t find some really cool, very, very cool, want so badly kind of stuff, but I couldn’t carry them out because they were too big and heavy.
Anyway, it was miserably hot. I believe I found the hardest, most difficult, poison ivy overgrown path I could possibly find into the creek. First attempt was a 25 foot drop straight down into the creek. I scouted a small section of the creek out, found lots of very cool stuff, but only a coupe of oysters and that was it fossil wise.
I was hot and wanted to check out another place before dark so I looked for an easier way out. I found one I thought I could manage. Problem was I was in my flip flops. I had no traction. If I’d been in my boots I’d had no problem at that spot. I couldn’t make it so I went further up creek. The creek water was like warm bath water and offered no relief from the heat. I came to a spot in the creek where a pool of water was divided off from the sandbar. I stepped into it and too my surprise the water was cool and sooooo refreshing. I splashed it all over myself to cool down and walked on. I walked maybe 10 feet and saw this on the edge by the creek bank. It seemed to have recently fallen about 4.5 feet from the middle of the creek bank above. There was a large clump of bank to the right that had more bone in it.
I have to mention that I was a few hundred yards from a cemetery so it gave me pause. I had to process it a moment and determine that these were not human bones.
Wouldn’t that be horrible! The cemetery could be 100 yrs old. The creek changes course over the years and encroaches upon the cemetery and graves start washing out into the creek!! Yikes! I’m sure it must have happened somewhere once upon a time. Didn’t happen here though.
Moving on. This was embedded in the bank about 4.5 feet from the portion of the creek I was standing on and about 5 feet down from the top of the bank. No way it could have been redeposited since it seems largely articulated. I’d been seeing concretions in the bank of the creek so initially I thought the ball to the right was a stone. I was taking a pic of the broken bone. Rib maybe? The ball and one above it I think are heads of femur or something.
Here is the bank. You can’t really see the other bones in the bank in this pic. They are there though.
Bad quality pic, but I removed some of the dirt from the bank to expose the bone. There is more bone to the right and left.
Some of the bones that had fallen from bank.
A vertebra
Anyway, do you think it is cow or could it be bison? That’s about all the pics I have. It’s modern, but I’m curious.
I am assuming the cow must have gotten stuck in the mud and died. The cool water in the creek had to be coming from an underground spring. This was maybe 10 feet from there. Maybe it made the soil very soft and contributed the the bovid’s demise.
I have come across cow skeletons on numerous occasions that died in a field and are completely disarticulated from wild animals scavenging them. That didn’t happen here. It must have been mud or something.

Hi all,
Recently my brother and I were on the Republican River in NE Kansas after the water went down a little and found a bunch of bones and bottles. I am having trouble determining some of the bones as bison or cow, so I need your help here. And also, we found what I think is a claw, measuring about an inch in length.
Thanks for the help, and let me know if you need more pics.
Cow or Bison lower leg? I think its bison; it is pretty heavy and seems to be well mineralized, but not completely fossilized.
And the mystery claw-like object

Just found this in the same little creek in southeast Nebraska that I've found stuff before. I believe it is a bovid phalanx, but I'm not very good at mamal IDs. Can anyone confirm or deny? It's dementions are approximately 1"X1.75"x1.5".

Bison priscus Bojanus, 1827
Right side Calcaenum or heel bone of a Steppe Bison. Location: North Sea, Netherlands
Not to be mistaken for the heel bone of a giant deer, which is quite similar. megaloceros giganteus heel bone